It’s important at the start of a piece of research to try to get a sense of the field – to establish the kinds of articles and books that are going to be useful. This is often a particularly hard task for doctoral researchers. Where to start? What to eliminate? How to decide what is important? There is just so much!!!

There are a couple of things that doctoral researchers need to do when starting a literature review. The first is of course to get a steer from the supervisor or committee about the key texts and key debates. The second is to skim read across a set of texts that appear to have something to do with the topic, in order to ‘get the lay of the land’.

Scanning a large number of articles allows you to get a sense of what’s out there and what might really be…

In the subsequent part of the present chapter on writing summaries (w11-ch5-part-2), we are going to unravel the features of reporting verbs (i.e. objective – evaluative) utilised in summary writing and try to find better alternatives to the introductory statements of a summary given in task seven. Our focus is also centred around summary reminder phrases and essential transitory elements along with example sentences. The following sub-section is devoted to the issue of a serious form of academic malpractice, that is, plagiarism. First, we are going to explore the actions which constitute instances of plagiarism and examine texts with its examples. Next, ways to avoid (self) plagiarism are going to be on our agenda, which also includes multiple-choice questions regarding this type of scholarly misconduct. The final part of our session aims to introduce and explain the key elements as well as the steps of an article review in detail.

In the first part of our session tomorrow, we are going to revise what we have studied about the data commentary section of academic writing via Task 15 on p. 136, and then our next activity is going to concentrate on the linguistic resources which could facilitate the discussion of imperfect data in theses or other academic manuscripts. The final subsection of the first part is going to present the frequently utilised terminology which helps us to make reference to graphs in data commentaries.

Our subsequent analysis is concerned with the first half of summary writing process. Particularly, this part attempts to seek answers to the following key questions:

What are the characteristics of an effective summary?

What are the main steps to be followed in order to thoroughly understand the source material?

What are we required to do while paraphrasing the ideas of other researchers?

What types of skeletal sentences/statements can be used to present the source in a summary?

What are the differences among quoting, paraphrasing, and summarising?

In so doing, we are going to consolidate the fact that summaries constitute the foundation for more complicated writing tasks such as a literature review, research papers as well as article/book reviews.

Besides the aforementioned points, in accordance with your preference, Harvard and APA citation styles are going to be on our agenda.

Finally, I would like to kindly inform you that you can find the first part of Chapter 5 on writing summaries here (w10-ch5-p1).

As known, we have already finished the first two subsections of the present chapter on data commentary (hereafter DC). Our session tomorrow is going to cover the following aspects: linguistic resources required to adjust the strength of claims, organisation of highlighting statements employed in DCs as well as further examples concerning comparative statements. Additionally, we are going to highlight the elements involved in the conclusion part of a DC and then, analyse the sentences of a sample DC in terms of their purposes and qualifying words/phrases. The verb phrases which could be necessary to discuss imperfect data, the special terminology to be used in interpreting graphs and the methods for referencing in academic studies are going to constitute the final section of our acwri session

In the latter part of Chapter 4 (w8-ch4-part2), we are going to touch upon the distinction between two types of summaries resorted to in theses and other academic manuscripts, that is, an indicative (general) summary and an informative summary. Furthermore, based on the corpus compiled by Ken Hyland, the most frequently utilized verbs referring to nonverbal illustrations (e.g. tables, charts, graphs, etc.) and linking as-clauses are going to be on our agenda. Next, we intend to review the linguistic resources which are needed to moderate our claim(s) and unravel what is meant by being “confidently uncertain” (Skelton, 1988) in academic writing. Finally, we plan to put such types of conventions into practice via a nonverbal sample.

The attached chapter (w7-ch4-part1) is concerned with the first part of data commentary, involves the course material which we studied in week 7. This section is of utmost importance particularly in the findings and results sections of your M.A. theses and academic manuscripts. In the first phase, with the aim of adjusting the strength of our claims, we examined possible sentence variations. At the same time, we attempted to explore the elements involved in the data commentary section such as highlighting results, reviewing and assessing the theories related to our field of study, comparing and evaluating various sets of data as well as the tools used to analyse the data and discussing the implications of our findings.